Monday, 30 September 2013

I have to comment on this letter because it is doing the rounds on FuckBase and it is a piece of disturbing insanity. It is sentimental and sounds really nice. That is obvious, if it didn't appeal it wouldn't be doing the rounds, but there are one or two serious problems. Here is the letter for your delectation.

LETTER FROM A MOTHER TO A DAUGHTER:

"My dear girl, the day you see I’m getting old, I ask you to please be patient, but most of all, try to understand what I’m going through.

If when we talk, I repeat the same thing a thousand times, don’t interrupt to say: “You said the same thing a minute ago”... Just listen, please. Try to remember the times when you were little and I would read the same story night after night until you would fall asleep.

When I don’t want to take a bath, don’t be mad and don’t embarrass me. Remember when I had to run after you making excuses and trying to get you to take a shower when you were just a girl?

When you see how ignorant I am when it comes to new technology, give me the time to learn and don’t look at me that way... remember, honey, I patiently taught you how to do many things like eating appropriately, getting dressed, combing your hair and dealing with life’s issues every day... the day you see I’m getting old, I ask you to please be patient, but most of all, try to understand what I’m going through.

If I occasionally lose track of what we’re talking about, give me the time to remember, and if I can’t, don’t be nervous, impatient or arrogant. Just know in your heart that the most important thing for me is to be with you.

And when my old, tired legs don’t let me move as quickly as before, give me your hand the same way that I offered mine to you when you first walked.

When those days come, don’t feel sad... just be with me, and understand me while I get to the end of my life with love.

I’ll cherish and thank you for the gift of time and joy we shared. With a big smile and the huge love I’ve always had for you, I just want to say, I love you... my darling daughter."

- Unknown,

If you think there is anything reasonable about this letter perhaps you will discover something about psychology by reading the following observations and criticism. If you think this letter is appalling but can't explain why then the following might help. If you think it's appalling and know why, the following may be interesting and may offer support to your relatively rare perception.

Why is a mother asking, almost begging, a daughter to be patient and understand her getting old? Why is the mother asking for understanding from a daughter who she clearly doesn't understand except in prejudicial anticipation of her being impatient and non-understanding? Why would you ask someone to be patient except that you were expecting them not to be?

One thing we know about children is that they learn from example. It is well understood in psychology that telling children what to do teaches them how to tell people what to do. Bullying begets bullying. Love begets love. The mother quite clearly has been impatient and non-understanding and feels anxious and a need to ask her daughter not to be like that.

If there were any doubt about that perception of the meaning of these words the letter goes on to confirm it. The second paragraph makes an obvious and glaring mistake, or rather reveals the hidden truth. To paraphrase it says "If I repeat myself don't criticise..." and one expects it to say "remember when you were young I didn't criticise you when you repeated yourself" but in fact it doesn't say that it says "remember when I kept repeating things when you were young." It is laughably a little worse "... until you were so bored you fell asleep!" This is a tragic letter and already the mother is pleading with the daughter "Please don't treat me like I treated you."

"When I don't want to take a bath, don't be mad and don't embarrass me." This is really getting bad! Why would anyone get angry and embarrass someone for not having a bath? Of course if you could answer that then you probably know - it's because that is their own attitude to themselves and there is only one place that came from and that is their childhood. It is clearly the expectation and suggests almost conclusively that it has always been the attitude of the writer and therefore the way she treated her daughter. But like the second paragraph this one makes explicit that the mother didn't treat the daughter the way she now wants to be treated. The allusion is to the equation "Don't hassle me I didn't hassle you." and in the most subtle way the wording is altered to confuse the brain into assuming that is what is being said. But revisit the actual words and what it says (paraphrased for illustration) is "Don't hassle me like I hassled you." What it says (verbatim) is "don’t be mad and don’t embarrass me. Remember when I had to run after you making excuses and trying to get you to take a shower". Like a lot of abuse the abuser thinks it is fun and when they retell the story it sounds like fun. There is complex trickery going on here. The ambivalence is allowing for the interpretation that the 'chasing' (running after) and 'deception' (excuses)' was fun. It is ambivalent because these things can be fun. But clearly the writer is concerned that the child will not be 'fun' and tries to persuade them that they had 'fun' when she was little. Why? Why would you need to 'remind' your daughter that you had fun? Do you think she forgot?

The next chunk is a total disaster. A lot could be said but the phrase "don't look at me that way" indicates a lot. First of all the letter was talking to the daughter about a possible future circumstance and now refers to a current event. Of course that 'current event' is in the mind of the writer but it is clearly being experienced in the mind of the writer as they write. So the writer 'knows' how her daughter will look at her and there are only two ways to 'know' that; one is prejudicially and the other is from experience. Given that, if the mother has the relationship with her daughter to which she alludes, she should have a good idea of what her daughters reaction will be then either she is unfairly ascribing negativity to her daughter or fairly ascribing negativity. Either way it doesn't reflect well on the mother. She is either being unfair now or was unfair in the past. Of course, people being what they are, it is likely to be both. So the mother is pleading "Please don't be intolerant..." and goes on to explain how she taught her daughter how to eat "appropriately", how to get dressed, how to comb her hair and how to deal with life's issues. This is possibly a case where one has to combine what one has learnt from the letter so far to make sense of what is being said at this point. The suggestion that the mother "patiently taught" all these things is in the light of the mother pleading with the daughter not to be intolerant. It seems strange to refer to bringing up a child as "teaching" them how to eat and dress but be that as it may the constant need to justify why the child should treat the mother reasonably is reeking of fear. It does bring to mind the phrase "The lady doth protest too much, methinks".

The prejudice is rife in this letter and now the writer says "don’t be nervous, impatient or arrogant". Then a really weird thing happens; the mother says something which may, in some profound sense, be true. The mother says "Just know in your heart that the most important thing for me is to be with you." It begs the question why is the mother having to tell the daughter that?

The bit about a helping hand sounds almost reasonable but I am left wondering why it has to be presented as a deal. Why wouldn't the daughter want to help? Why does she have to be persuaded by the equation 'do it for me because I did it for you'?

The next bit is the only bit in the entire letter that sounded reasonable. Given that this is supposed to be a letter about a loving relationship the mother says "don't be sad". It is the first indication of the mother seeming to care how the daughter feels. The tragic irony is that the mother doesn't go on to say anything about how it has all been worthwhile but rather asks for more 'understanding' from the daughter.

And the last paragraph, if it stood alone, is really nice.

But overall this letter is the most sickly sweet sentimental gluey manipulation I have read in a long time. The serious problem with this letter is that it illustrates that some people cannot tell the difference between loving someone else for who they are and 'needing to be loved'.

Saturday, 28 September 2013

There was a program on the BBC's Radio 4 this morning called iPM which was about child porn on the internet. The blurb said "A man convicted of viewing images of child abuse tells iPM why he wasn't sent to prison, but sent on a course instead. The Policing Minister tells us that all people who view images of child abuse should go to prison". These people - the BBC and the Minister - all sound as if they are being profound and thoughtful but really they are running a perverse agenda. Psychologically speaking one of the effects of abuse is that the abused person has their perception warped. These people are 'conforming' to the cultural and social expectations imposed on them by an abusive culture. Therefore their perception is warped and you can hear it in their pretentious, non-compassionate, prejudicial attitudes. Anyway I was moved to email the program at iPM@bbc.co.uk with the following.

Hello Eddie Mair and Jennifer Tracey

Saturday morning's iPM was about child pornography on the internet and I was a little horrified listening to Damian Green's moralising. Of course as the Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice he is on a bit of a safe bet to express simplistic polarising dictates. (In fact he might be hard put to keep his job if he didn't.) And I entirely agree that the subject is a serious one that needs consideration and debate. But what I can hear beneath his words is a 'not so subtle' passive-aggressive, rather sanctimonious, judgemental prejudice. There is a reason why I find this important enough to communicate and it is because when the Jimmy Savile abuses were finally discovered nearly everyone expressed utter bewilderment at how such an excess could be entirely missed. I think these things are missed because we are, as a culture, sanctifying ourselves with a simplistic moralistic attitude to some prejudicial construct of the 'other' who is wrong.

I know this might be controversial and provocative but I suspect the impetus to interpret the observer as party to the crime is actually the fear of recognising the crime. It is a similar error to that in 'blaming the messenger'. The mistake is to think that if you destroy the messenger you will eradicate the message. In the case of child pornography on the internet it seems too difficult to deal with the perpetrators of abuse and so the viewer is targeted as the easier option. It is, of course, a profound mistake because it promotes cultural blindness. No one is allowed to see the crime and so it becomes the collective illusion of the emperor's new clothes.

I suspect people who agree with the Right Honourable Damian Green imagine that by eradicating the audience they will cause the crime to cease to exist. This is flawed thinking and there appears little or no evidence to suggest this approach has ever had any success historically. Worse than that, the evidence seems to suggest that this approach drives the abuse underground where it escalates. People are understandably anxious about the pain and injustice of child abuse and feel that something should be done about it. Unfortunately it seems that finding someone to blame and punitively incarcerating them reduces the anxiety but does nothing about the crime. This is how people 'feel better' and conclude they must, therefore, be doing something right. But it is very close to how 'blaming the victim' works.

Overall I don't imagine anyone will bother to consider what I have said. It probably seems too hard to comprehend. But this is the conceptual paradigm of the thought police. And much as I genuinely expect Damian Green regards himself as a 'good' person I do worry that he is inadvertently making the situation worse.

In summary it is obviously an injustice to blame the viewer of the crime.

After being amused by the poetic justice I was sad for the young son whose two parents might be incarcerated.

It seems that this 38 year old lady, Elizabeth Laura Lewis, was a well qualified fraud investigator and worked for the Department for Work and Pensions. It was her husband, Mark Scott Lewis, who was found guilty of defrauding HM Revenue and Customs of over three quarters of a million pounds by lying to them by claiming his charity had received donations of £3 million; It was dormant and received virtually nothing.

He had at least 27 companies registered at Companies House and used them to shovel money about attempting to launder it. His wife, Elizabeth, was party to these shenanigans and benefited in many ways including being gifted a whole house! She claimed she had no idea about the fraud she was party to but the jury decided otherwise.

What on earth are we to do with these people? It is happening all over the place and the people surrounding these criminals know perfectly well something is amiss even if they don't know precisely what. It is not just the irony of a benefit fraud investigator being as bent as a nine bob note that is stunning but that it is happening all over the place. It is no surprise that no one could see the abuse being perpetrated by Jimmy Savile when there is so much of it embedded in our culture. It makes me think of the fact that only 10% of the biological material in our bodies is our DNA; The rest is bacteria. I feel that way about our culture sometimes. It is as if 90% of the people are aberrant abusive aliens.

Sunday, 22 September 2013

Conspiracy theories are rife. They are coming out of the genetically engineered ear-hole. But I have another one. A new conspiracy theory. It is not a big one and it is not a world domination one. My theory is a little home town local theory about some members of the Conservative Party. It may be that it links in to a bigger conspiracy and it may turn out that it is all part of the New World Order and the takeover of Global Power. It may be the beginnings of the greatest empire we have ever known but that is something else.

I saw a picture of Chris Grayling and suddenly, like Saul on the road to Damascus, I had an epiphany. I was struck down by a great blinding light (metaphorically you'll understand - I have to add this qualification because the 'literal' and 'metaphorical' have been known to get a bit mixed up in the past - Lazarus for example - or maybe not!). I quickly went to my graphics package and rummaged through hundreds of folders of jpegs and gifs. I found what I was looking for. I found the top half of Chris Grayling's head in one image and the bottom half in another. I pulled them out, resized them and graphically compared them. I was right.

Genetic cross between IDS & Shapps = Grayling

What I discovered was irrefutable evidence of genetic manipulation of the Conservative Party. Now it is only a theory, and a suspicion, that Monsanto is behind this but like all good hunches the odds are it will turn out to be true. What I discovered was Monsanto have genetically extracted certain attributes from the Party Moron, Iain Duncan Smith. It seems his incredibly vacuous skull has been of special interest. They have then taken their flag ship product, the genetically engineered Party Cretin, Grant Shapps, and selected some of his more successful attributes. In his case it appears to be his inane grin which they feel indicates a 'friendly' Party. They have taken these genes, mixed them up a bit and produced a cross with the perverse grin of the Cretin, Shapps, topped by the empty dome of the Moron Smith and produced an entirely new mutant Imbecile which they have named the Chris Grayling (from the genus Thymallus of the Salmonidae family more commonly known as the Grayling).

The terms moron, cretin and imbecile derive from the field of eugenics which is a little out of favour nowadays because of its association with the Nazis. It is unfortunate that this interesting field of study has effectively been curtailed (at least publically) because it seems to have a lot to offer in terms of understanding the Conservative Party and what one can do about them.

There is a lovely castle called Schloss Hartheim in Austria where people were, how can I put this, genetically improved for the betterment of the wealthy sociopaths, oops I mean the health and wellbeing of humanity.

Hartheim Castle in Austria

Some rather unscrupulous people described this beautiful castle for genetic cleansing as a euthanasia centre - fancy that!. It was one location for the "Action T4" project of the Nazis but to be fair they did rid the world of over 18,000 physically and mentally disabled in that one castle alone by gassing them or by lethal injection. Overall the Action T4 project murdered more than a quarter of a million disabled people. Action T4 was the nickname given to the organisation in Germany whose official name translates as the Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care. How nice these Nazis were, caring, in a curative way, and charitably to boot, for all these poorly people.

I came across a nice poster that the Nazi party produced (NSDAP are the initials of the official name for the Nazi party which in English translates to National Socialist German Workers' Party - cute eh?)

Poster by the Nazi Party circa 1938

This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read 'New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."

Now it strikes me that the nice Nazis understood only too well how much the scroungers - I mean the sick and disabled - um ... sorry, the defective people cost the tax payers - oops, I mean fellow citizens. Why do I keep slipping into British terminology? Silly me! I didn't mean to associate the Conservatives and their constant degrading references to the sick, disabled and unemployed as fraudsters and scroungers who are costing the decent hard working, tax-paying public literally billions of pounds with the Nazis. I really didn't mean to make such an 'esoteric' connection with the Conservative Party and their rhetoric and the Nazi Party and their rhetoric. That would be so silly and uncharitable of me wouldn't it?

Was it the conservative party that was driving the 'Racist Vans' around London? No my memory must be playing tricks on me. And I don't recall there ever being such a thing as the 'spare bedroom subsidy' prior to the under occupancy penalty, known as the 'Bedroom Tax', being deemed in breach of international human rights by the United Nations. But my memory must be failing me because respectable politicians wouldn't indulge in such deception.

The serious message of this post is that the current language and law making of the Conservatives is quite genuinely transforming and degrading into doublespeak and deception at an alarming rate. This is exactly what happened in the financial crisis in Germany prior to the Second World War. In Britain today there is no financial reason to cut the welfare budget in the way that the Conservatives are doing. It is actually costing them billions more than they are saving but they are producing millions of disenfranchised poor and disabled people so that the next step will be easier and seem more logical and necessary. They are on a mission to reduce the population of this country and to date it is working. They are reacting like thugs at the suggestion by the UN that their policies may be inhumane and are illegally lying about, and hiding, the death toll figures of their policies. It does seem that they are in so much potential trouble that they have no option but to continue the deception. This, in an individual, is described as compulsive behaviour and all the signs are there for the Conservative party. Please be vigilant, don't tolerate the utter nonsense just because it is becoming 'normal' and continue to fight back with everything you can muster.

Friday, 20 September 2013

All of my life I have been bothered by those 'little' things people do which are wholly illegitimate. Those 'little' lies excused as 'white lies'. Those self contradictory statements that you are supposed to allow past your rational filter on the grounds that 'you know what it means'. Well if it is supposed to 'mean' something else why don't they say it. It has taken me a lifetime to even begin to fathom the depths of what is really going on. And I still don't understand well enough to know what to do about it.

I have just read a little story in the Grimsby Telegraph entitled "Firearm threat made to council tax bailiff". It turns out that some bloke went upstairs and got his air rifle in response to the bailiff's implied threat to take his car. It is a difficult to work out quite what happened because the report is a little scant but it seems the bloke (Mr Capes) was not at home and the bailiff was at Mr Capes' house. It seems that they were speaking on the phone and Mr Capes arrived home five minutes later somewhat agitated by the bailiff's suggestion of taking Mr Capes' car. (Incidentally I wonder if an air rifle is actually a 'fire' arm.) What bothered me was that the judge (Judge Peter Clark) said that Mr Capes should have known better than to threaten a man "who was just doing his job".

The reason this bothers me is because it goes straight to the heart of a fundamental problem in our society. One very important concept in any civilised society is 'due process'. Due process seems to be the issue that if the right to action is removed from an individual that the 'authority' is obliged to act lawfully.

The idea that you should not "take the law into your own hands" is only serviceable if the law acts legitimately and with due process. If you are not allowed to defend yourself then the law must. But if the long arm of the law is acting illegitimately then the net result is that the authority is simply an oppressive dictatorship.

It seems that our culture is in serious decline. There are any number of contradictory issues going on and they are more and more in favour of the rich and powerful and against the poor and vulnerable. One example is the way the law was recently changed such that any housing benefit was paid directly to the claimant instead of to the landlord. The next stage was to introduce the 'Bedroom Tax' which means a 14% reduction in housing benefit if the claimant is deemed to have a spare room. (The details of this piece of incompetent legislation are subtle and it is referred to as the "under-occupation penalty" by the government literature. It has recently been re-dubbed as the removal of the "spare room subsidy" which is just a ridiculous manipulation of the language and disgustingly depraved of the government to be playing this cheap linguistic game.) It is IN FACT a tax because the government is removing the money from the claimant's bank account before it gets there. What this arrangement achieves is that the legal issue is now between the landlord and the tenant instead of between the landlord and the government which is where it should lie if the claimant has a right to adequate housing. So the government is not paying the full amount of the rent and leaves the private landlord and the claimant fighting a battle in court. This results in eviction and more serious trouble for someone who simply cannot afford it. Oh and to add insult to injury the right to legal aid has been removed such that many of these claimants cannot get due access to legal protection. It is all Mafioso tactics. There are also the changes to the Department of Work and Pensions and disability payments as well as the unemployment benefits. These changes are being introduced in stages with each stage having some veneer of justification but the irony is that the justification is different for different stages and if it were all put together is blatantly contradictory. It results in unqualified people being employed at very low rates of pay being effectively given impunity to 'sanction' (there's another doublespeak term - people refer to 'sanctioning' the claimant - in fact even the DWP's literature says the claimant can be sanctioned - NO - the sanction is of the otherwise illegitimate behaviour. In other words it is illegal to steal someone's legitimate payment but by way of 'forcing' people to comply with your wishes the illegal act of stopping someone's payment is 'sanctioned'. So it is the illegitimate action that is given sanction and NOT the claimant.) the reduction of a claimants benefit payment. This is the beginnings of a very nasty authoritarian and fascist style oppression and control. The low paid workers in the DWP and Atos are handed the power to destroy other people's lives but their own meagre wages are threatened such that if they don't achieve certain 'targets' they will lose their job. This is how you get people to push others into the gas chamber. And as Philip Zimbardo well understands this social arrangement will cascade out of control. Philip Zimbardo being the professor famous for the Stanford prison experiment. You can watch a very revealing short talk by him entitled "What Makes People Go Wrong?" on another page of ToxicDrums' blog.

The summary of all this is that the government is denying our right to act in our own self defence and then not being duly responsible on our behalf. The net result is that abuse is on the increase and, worse, is increasing at an ever increasing rate. I have more and more frequently encountered cases where government officials, police, councils, even NHS personnel instruct, quite incorrectly, with an assumed authority way above their position. But if you question them you are deemed to be causing trouble and the issue suddenly becomes about the trouble you are causing as if it weren't related to the original cause.

This is what strikes me about the case of Mr Capes. Who is to say he wasn't in arrears because of the illegal behaviour of the government. Even IF there were any legitimacy to the argument that he owed money to the council they simply do not have the legal right to remove his car. But in assuming that whatever they think they can do must be right and even suggesting to Mr Capes that they 'could' remove his car is irresponsible in the extreme and quite illegal. So you have a dishonest thief on your doorstep and you 'frighten' him off with an unloaded air rifle and the judge says he was "just doing his job". No! The judge is 'assuming' he was doing his job but he certainly didn't ascertain if that fact were true. If he was acting outside the legal domain of his job then he was acting illegally as a criminal. he was precisely NOT doing his job.

But in this current oppressive climate can we expect anyone, let alone a self interested judge, to actually examine the facts before passing judgement?

I might be accused of making a mountain out of a mole hill but I can assure the reader there is a significant mountain being made out of mole hills.

Thursday, 12 September 2013

I am shocked by what Mr Grant Shapps had to say about the UN initial report into the bedroom tax.

Grant Shapps [ref] is apparently the Conservative Party chairman. He only has 5 O-levels and his cousin is a punk rocker. His parents are Jewish and the best he could achieve academically was an HND in business and finance. Speaking as one who has more than twice as many O-levels, a couple of A-levels, a B.A. (Hons) and an M.Sc. he seems to me a remarkably unimpressive individual.

Personally I find that description offensive and I wouldn't have written it except as a parody of Mr Shapps' own remarks about a certain well respected United Nations Human Rights Special Rapporteur by the name of Raquel Rolnik.

Mr Grant 'Arrogant' Shapps said of Raquel Rolnik that she was "a woman from Brazil, a country that has 50m people in inadequate housing," he derided her international investigation and report by claiming, quite falsely, that she "has come over, failed to meet with any government ministers, with any officials from the Department of Work and Pensions or even to refer to the policy by its accurate name anywhere in the report at all."

That sounds rather irrational and arrogant. Raquel Rolnik did meet with many government ministers and departments as specifically referenced in her report. She also specifically referred correctly to the "under occupancy penalty" [ref] when she introduced it saying "Especially worrisome in this package is the so-called "bedroom tax", or the spare bedroom under occupancy penalty." So Mr Arrogant is a liar too. Of course, in the House of Commons, etiquette dictates that he is not allowed to be called a liar he is simply mistaken and is misleading people. He possibly doesn't even know the policies "accurate name" hence his rather ignorant claim that Ms Rolnik didn't refer to the policy accurately.

As it happens: "Raquel Rolnik is an architect and urban planner with over 30 years experience in planning and urban land management. She is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo. At the 7th session of the Human Rights Council she was appointed second United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing." [ref]

But the under qualified minister who goes by the name Grant Shapps, and who hasn't even got a portfolio (hence the double speak 'title' "Minister without Portfolio" - What is that about? I have several special titles including "Not a fireman", "Without beard" and "Lacking in the Lamborghini department"), feels perfectly at ease deriding the highly qualified Raquel Rolnik by slighting her origins by saying she "comes over" (to the UK from Brazil) and claims her country has 50 million people in inadequate housing as if to suggest that disqualifies her from rational observation. I would be interested to know where Mr Shapps got that figure because IF it was ever true I doubt it is current. It appears that in 2010 the figure stood at about 7 million families and it has improved since then. But that aside the horrible Mr Shapps is simply besmirching Ms Rolnik by speculative and prejudicial association. And funnily enough he is casually 'slagging off' Brazil by way of deriding Ms Rolnik. I guess such uncouth devices are to be expected from the under qualified arrogant classes!

Grant Shapps is also acting exactly as might be characteristic of an errant dictator being criticised for breaching International Human Rights. He is making it up as he goes along. He is arrogantly denigrating the United Nations and their personnel. He is trying to personally insult individuals by making seemingly derogatory references to their place of origin. He is claiming things that are blatantly untrue. He is, in fact, wildly denying the truth because he and his party are not only criminals but someone has noticed and is big enough to say so.

And a paragraph I particularly appreciated in Raquel Rolnik's report (to be strictly accurate it is only an initial press release - the full report is due to be presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council at its 25th session in March 2014) stated:

"The right to housing is not about a roof anywhere, at any cost, without any social ties. It is not about reshuffling people according to a snapshot of the number of bedrooms at a given night. It is about enabling environments for people to maintain their family and community bonds, their local schools, work places and health services allowing them to exercise all other rights, like education, work, food or health."

Wednesday, 4 September 2013

Why do I even feel the need to use my time writing this stuff. People who WANT to believe that the world is full of good and bad people and if we bomb the hell out of the BAD people it will sort everything out are simply the bullies in the playground. They clearly have their own problems and it seems they were bullied and ACCEPTED it. It was probably their parents and teachers who bullied them. They learnt well.

But unfortunately it is not like that.

When it comes to Syria it is clear there is a lot of strife over there. It is clear that a lot of people are being pushed to feel that there is no other way than to fight. Whether that is the Assad regime or the population or the rebels or the terrorists is not really the point. One thing is for sure - a lot of people feel that their perspective is not understood by others. What would really help would be to voice these opinions and have them heard. But it is also true that people end up lying in order to 'prove' something they can't manage to prove to the numbskulls on the other side. So people lie which makes it almost impossible to talk to resolve issues so we are back to splatting each other.

But we do know some facts; America was working out how to control the Middle East around the turn of the century. I certainly recall reading documents that the American administration were writing which outlined the need to control the area. It was all about the transport and delivery of gas and oil mainly via pipelines. They needed influence and control in Afghanistan and Iraq amongst other places. How convenient it then turned out to be that a bunch of respectable mercenaries (financed by the Americans) turned bad and brought the World Trade Center down.

Was that not always a very spurious event? Everything about it stinks. How could the US be running a war game practising EXACTLY the same scenario on EXACTLY the same day? How ridiculous to suppose they could be so up to date that they couldn't do anything to prevent the shocking and unbelievable "terrorist" attack. Why would a bunch of religious fanatics living in caves in Afghanistan demolish the World Trade Centre towers? Why? And how could they do it? The US had fully armed fighter jets - yes, fully armed and ready to go - in the vicinity and they sent them out over the Atlantic in the opposite direction. How plausible does the collapse of those two towers look? And what about the World Trade Centre Building 7 collapse which could not have been cause by anything other than a controlled demolition and was accidentally reported by the BBC 23 minutes before it happened?

But funny how it rallied public opinion to allow a full scale war against Afghanistan and Iraq. The clinching argument for attacking Iraq was the 'proof' that Sadam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This has since 'proved' to be lies and no one seems terribly worried about it.

Syria is another country in the list of countries the US, the UK and Europe plan to gain influence over. They have been committed to this for years. Does it not seem a bit odd that Assad is being relentlessly attacked by ... hang on ... that same bunch of CIA funded mercenaries that allegedly brought down the WTC? And does it not seem odd that both Obama and Cameron pre-empted the current crisis by stating that if Assad used chemical weapons that it would be "crossing a red line". Some months ago I recall a few news reports which never came to much where U.N. investigators were saying that the rebels had used sarin gas. (One article in the Chicago News entitled "UN has testimony that Syrian rebels used sarin gas" appeared back in May)

Now we are expected to believe that Assad has arbitrarily and uncharacteristically gassed some innocent people. Both the US and the UK have claimed that Assad used sarin gas against the Syrian population. Most of the time they say things like "it is inconceivable that the rebels used it" or "there is substantial reason to believe Assad used it" but I have heard reports stating it as a fact. It is quite clearly NOT a fact. And strangely there seems to be more sense for the rebels to use it. It would provoke the US and the UK and France to bomb Assad. Why would Assad do it? I happen to think the rebels are simply saps for the US and the UK. I think this is all being clumsily orchestrated by the Western powers.